BC3 Seminars: Deep ice core drilling, polar ice-sheet flow and its implications for climate change

BC3 Seminars
“Deep ice core drilling, polar ice-sheet flow and its implications for climate change.“

Prof. Kumiko Goto-Azuma

National Institute of Polar Research, Tokyo, Japan

Abstract

Ice cores provide not only palaeoclimate information on timescales from decades to hundreds of millennia, but also very important information on ice sheets dynamics that shows how fast the ice sheets flow. To understand the physical and mechanical properties of ice-sheet ice is of vital importance to predict the future ice sheet behavior due to the global warming. During the past two decades, several deep ice drilling projects have been conducted in Greenland and Antarctica. In Greenland the international projects recovered four deep ice cores at GRIP, GISP2, NGRIP and NEEM sites. In Antarctica ten deep ice cores were recovered which include Dome C, EPICA-Dronning Maud Land, and Dome Fuji cores. These ice cores show how closely climate and greenhouse gas concentrations were linked in the past, and demonstrate that very abrupt climate switches can occur. With the completion of major projects in Greenland and Antarctica, the international ice coring community is planning for the next few decades to obtain the oldest ice which goes back to 1.5 million years ago.

Japan has been collaborating with over 20 years on development of drilling techniques, logistics and physics and chemistry analyses of ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica. In this talk I will introduce the history of international drilling projects and some of the major scientific results relevant to ice sheet dynamics.